Contents — sarahdavidson

Blending In
Auxier Kline, New York
March 28 - April 25, 2025

While Sarah Davidson often draws directly from ‘nature’, their work diffracts distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable web. Meshes of hatching reveal glimpses into a jumble of images, and the works weave together observational drawing and an abstract vocabulary of shapes to evoke bodies and suggest an ambiguous interiority. Looking and other forms of sensing disintegrate into each other, revealing something porous, strange and seductive.

The works in this exhibition combine observational drawing with biomorphic abstraction, interlacing the kind of illustration most familiar from natural history guides with bodily shapes that hover on the edge of the appealing and the grotesque. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, many of the paintings seem caught in the process of transformation; goopy oil stick melts into thinly rendered linework, and flora and fauna waver in and out of perception. Cut with a jigsaw, the edges of the panels undulate slightly, like leaves or sheets of paper.

In the large new diptych Crypsis, a central butterfly shape lurks behind spiky jimsonweed and a tangle of branch-like tubular structures. Shading on a leaf suggests both hair and muscle, and the overall impression is of macro and micro worlds enmeshed. The small new paintings, Skipper and Brushfoot, named for local butterflies, zoom in so far that their winglike patterns become abstract texture.

For the artist, an interest in ‘nature’ as a subject comes from time spent working as a wilderness guide. For 10 years, they made a living guiding expeditions for an outdoor school. ‘Nature’, they realized, has often been weaponized to delineate the bounds of heteronormative propriety, erase Indigenous nations, and otherwise police the boundaries of the dominant culture. While they often drew directly from observation in the ‘wilderness’, they became increasingly aware that this was a fraught gesture, one which begs the question: who is seeing who, and how?

During the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, they developed a series of drawings which all featured butterflies or moths (or parts of their wings), and eyes which appeared to look back at the viewer. These have since evolved into oil paintings, and the artist talks about them as a reflection of their own experience: “during the past four years, my gender identity has been in flux and my obsession with butterflies and moths (particularly the phase of their life cycles called ‘diapause’, when they transform) reflects coming to terms with my own trans non-binary identity, transitioning, and the destabilizing experience of having to rethink much of how I define and experience the world. I have a number of questions, as I develop my ongoing project: how does biomorphism relate to queerness, transness, and painting? How can elements of body horror in my work unsettle ways of looking at them? Is there such a thing as queer abstraction, or a queer art which eschews human representation?”

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SARAH DAVIDSON (b. 1989) is originally from Canada, where they pursued their art education, at Emily Carr University (BFA, Visual Art, 2015) and the University of Guelph (MFA, Visual Art, 2019). From 2011-2021, they worked as a hiking and climbing guide, spending months of each year in remote locations in Canada, the United States and Scandinavia. They relocated to New York in 2022, and currently live and work in Brooklyn. They have exhibited their work throughout Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Shin Gallery, New York (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019). Their two person booth at NADA (presented by Wil Aballe Art Projects alongside Daniel Giordano) was named one of the ‘Best Booths of NADA’ by ARTnews in 2023, and their work has been covered by Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Fukt Magazine, and more. Their upcoming projects include curating a group exhibition at Springs Projects, New York (opening June 2025), which considers queer and trans ecologies and includes artists from New York, Montreal, Vancouver, and Rotterdam (NL).